Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday June 30, 2013 @07:28AM
from the hasn't-anyone-seen-airplanes-I-or-II? dept.

cylonlover writes with this Gizmag excerpt: "In April of this year, a BAE Systems Jetstream research aircraft flew from Preston in Lancashire, England, to Inverness, Scotland and back. This 500-mile (805 km) journey wouldn't be worth noting if it weren't for the small detail that its pilot was not on board, but sitting on the ground in Warton, Lancashire and that the plane did most of the flying itself. Even this alteration of a standard commercial prop plane into an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) seems a back page item until you realize that this may herald the biggest revolution in civil aviation since Wilbur Wright won the coin toss at Kitty Hawk in 1903."

Of course not. You'll be on the ground and you'll be watching the picture from the camera behind your window. First class seats will have better resolution. Economy class seats will have black and white picture.

If you fly commercial air flights, you already trust your life to most of the technologies involved. As the article mentions, "larger aircraft have autopilot systems that can control takeoff, ascent, cruising, descent, approach, and landing." An unmanned flight was the logical next step in the progression.

I don't think we'll see passenger flights without pilots anytime soon, but you might begin seeing flights where you have only a co-pilot on board. It would be a long time before there would be enough evidence that the pilots weren't needed and the majority of the public would trust the systems enough to be willing to fly.

Yes. This would almost certainly be a democratic decision by the flying public, on whether to go pilotless or not. Thanks to the forces of economics.

There are numerous airlines in this world, and most routes (at least the popular ones) are served by multiple companies. The smaller routes don't count much in this picture, and those are likely to be the last to be automated, for there are less savings to be made. Also volume is just a fraction of that on the main routes.

Now if one company moves to pilotless flights, presumably to undercut the fares of the competition, the public has an obvious choice. If they accept the lower fare for a pilotless flight, the rest will follow. If they do not, the pilotless airline will have to reinstate their pilots or go out of business.

Or more likely, the other airlines will go pilotless but stuff some guy in an old uniform to act as a greeter and then sit in the cockpit while trying to look important.Then they'll run the commercials about how much they care about you.

With the current retirement age already at 65, and efforts to raise it again to 67, I think we are already where you suggest- old guys in ice cream suits. When I got hired at age 32, I was excited, but soon realized I would have to do this for a long time (age 60) before I retired. I wondered if my body or mind would give out before then- radiation exposure, embolisms, poor diet, working during WOCL, physical inactivity. As if it hasn't already...

Every pilot starts out with two buckets. One is filled with luck, the other empty of experience. Fill the experience bucket before the luck bucket runs out.

"If they accept the lower fare for a pilotless flight, the rest will follow."

On long flights, there will be several pilots on different shifts instead of 1 tired one, if a pilot keels over for any of 500 reasons, they'll have replacements ready to take over in a second. And on arrival in Rio, the pilot in the US just drives home instead of being stuck there in a noisy hotel with a bad mattress to get fresh for the flight back and trying to get sleep with 5 or 6 drinks.They'll argue it's more secure and ther

it takes 8 years to qualify for commercial jet right seat (navigator), and that's full-time and intensive from single engine prop VFR to qualifying on emergency landing in a 747 box simulator and everything in between. It isn't cheap, either. Probably a million or so a year for one pilot or navigator. Airlines part-subsidise this cost in a lot of cases with the proviso that the pilot then flies for that airline for the next twenty years.

That's weird, somehow it only took me two and a half years to get to the right seat of a jet. Just over a year of ATPL theory, 6 months of intensive VFR/IFR/twin engine training, and then onto the type rating. I know it's different in the states, where they require a couple of thousand hours flying in aeroclubs and cheesy cargo operations before even considering you for a jet, but many European companies have ab initio programs that take a lot less time.

If you fly commercial air flights, you already trust your life to most of the technologies involved. As the article mentions, "larger aircraft have autopilot systems that can control takeoff, ascent, cruising, descent, approach, and landing."

Flying is the ultimate in trusting technology, even before the autopilot. You are suspended in the air by nothing but the reliability of the engines to keep you from dropping 30,000 feet into the middle of the Pacific ocean, thousands of miles from any help. The fac

If you fly commercial air flights, you already trust your life to most of the technologies involved. As the article mentions, "larger aircraft have autopilot systems that can control takeoff, ascent, cruising, descent, approach, and landing." An unmanned flight was the logical next step in the progression.

The reason we have pilots is that these systems fail or fuckup all the time, but because we have pilots, its not an issue. The pilot takes over and sets things right, and none of these incidents are even reported. There is not a bit of paperwork filed when a pilot has to assume control of a take off or an approach due to any circumstance what so ever.

Remember that even THIS flight had a pilot.

The systems you mention work fine in "the clean room" of a totally controlled environment, and they fail with the

The autopilot was flying the plane. At least until it lost needed data to do so. Then as programed, it relinquished control to the only known entity that could cope- human pilots. The error was in flying into the storm in the first place. Thereafter, with conflicting data, the pilots made numerous further errors which aggravated their distress to the point of stall. In large swept wing aircraft, stall recovery is a long process and requires patience and often thousands of feet of altitude loss, while operating in alternate or direct flight control laws (not particularly easy). The rapid descent and threat of impact with the ground did not foster patience and the flight crew was inadequately trained in stall recovery, making the outcome more certain.

As a result, and to my dismay as an Airbus pilot, Airbus have modified their stall recovery procedure to retard thrust to idle- contrary to every thing pilots are taught from the very first stall.

I am not a pilot nor am I trained in aviation. My impression of the Air France disaster was that it was caused, in part, by an incorrect mental model of the situation in the mind(s) of the pilot(s). The pilot at the controls was making control inputs that didn't make sense for the situation, but he wasn't an idiot, so he must have not understood the situation. It didn't seem to help matters that the aircraft systems quit warning about a stall when the systems could not make sense of the sensor inputs, the

They had attitude information, but no air data (altitude, airspeed, vertical speed). They were also, for a time, making dual and contrary inputs to the flight controls (sticks are independent and dual inputs are added together, one full up and one full down equals zero). Without air data, avoiding stall and recovering was made significantly more difficult.

However, they did recognize stall. They just failed to execute a proper recovery. They needed to hold the nose down for much longer to build airspeed bef

They did not realize that they were making contrary inputs. And I do not agree that they recognized the stall. The pilot in control kept pulling back at the stick for most of the fall, and no sane pilot would do that if he knew he was in a stall.

The Airbus way of not making the physical sticks move in concert must have contributed to the confusion. The mishap report does not dare say that.

Well, one pilot recognized the stall (the left-seater, IIRC) and pushed the stick forward. The right-seater, the most junior member of the aircrew, was the one pulling back. The problem was that the right-seater wasn't communicating what he was doing, and the left-seater didn't say, "pilot's airplane" or do anything else that established that he was the one in control.

The senior pilot, who was on rest when the incident began, also recognized the stall and got the junior pilot to finally say that he was p

If it ever gets approved to civilian passenger use, the flight deck would be impregnable from the passenger cabin. All controls will be
locked and so even if a terrorist gains access he/she would not be able to direct the plane to high value target. At this point all you
they can do would be to crash the plane, which can be done without trying to get to the flight deck. But destroying a passenger
airliner in flight would get them big headlines and attention. That is basically what the terrorists want.

Destroying two towers and damaging one building is nothing for a country the size and might of USA. Compared to devastation of WW-II
Dresden, Berlin, Stalingrad, Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima etc, 9/11/2001 does not even qualify as a flea bite. But 9/11 made more headlines
and more news than all the impact made by WW-II news in its day in the prized demographics of the terrorists.

The reaction of the media, and hence the public, is like an auto-immune reaction or allergy reaction. Some harmless pollen grains are
detected in the bronchia and the body responds as though it is being invaded by the Ebola virus. So even after we deny the ability of
terrorists to fly fully fueled planes into buildings, the media reaction for an attempted terrorist attack, no matter how successful, no
matter how far fetched, would ensure the terrorists get their oxygen: publicity.

What we really need to prevent terrorist attacks is large doses of anti-histamine. Just ignore the terrorists, their attempts, their successes, their failures. Only when develop the collective ability to deny them publicity we will win the war on terrorism.

If it ever gets approved to civilian passenger use, the flight deck would be impregnable from the passenger cabin. All controls will belocked and so even if a terrorist gains access he/she would not be able to direct the plane to high value target.

You are assuming that the terrorist would be on board the plane. Iran was able to capture a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 operated by the CIA using an attack on the remote location and command and control systems.

That is an unsubstantiated claim by Iran. It is equally as possible that there was a glitch in the system and the drone auto landed. If Iran had the ability to capture drones electronically there would be a lot of drones being captured. It is an attempt by Iran to embarrass the US and it worked pretty well.

By the way, please check you link before posting Here [wikipedia.org] is the correct one.

If it ever gets approved to civilian passenger use, the flight deck would be impregnable from the passenger cabin. All controls will belocked and so even if a terrorist gains access he/she would not be able to direct the plane to high value target.

planes are fly by wire nowadays, there is no need to touch flight sticks, those are just potentiometers with force feedback, plane brain is in the lower decks next to cargo hold.

The reaction of the media, and hence the public, is like an auto-immune reaction or allergy reaction. Some harmless pollen grains are
detected in the bronchia and the body responds as though it is being invaded by the Ebola virus. So even after we deny the ability of
terrorists to fly fully fueled planes into buildings, the media reaction for an attempted terrorist attack, no matter how successful, no
matter how far fetched, would ensure the terrorists get their oxygen: publicity.

What we really need to prevent terrorist attacks is large doses of anti-histamine. Just ignore the terrorists, their attempts, their successes, their failures. Only when develop the collective ability to deny them publicity we will win the war on terrorism.

Similar thing with the school shooting IMO, I expect that if we stopped having a media circus after each one and turning the shitbags into celebrities we'd see a marked decrease. Instead we just keep making bigger deals and probably inspiring more people to go out in a blaze of "glory".

Yes, the initial costs were high, but most of the costs you cite are reaction costs. How much did a week of grounding all airlines cost? How much does additional TSA infrastructure cost? How mush of that $1.4 trillion lost stock valuation was real vs just numbers in a computer, and how much of that was due to panic reaction?

As the grandparent pointed out, if we'd reacted with the attitude "shit happens, deal with it" (as was, for example, the attitude in Britain after the first few days of the Blitz), that final cost would have been far smaller; still 3000 lives, but probably less than $0.01 trillion dollars.

That is cool, but would you? Is it more safe if the pilot can't be reached?

There is no greater motivator to avoid crashes than having the driver up front and first to die.

There is no way I'm getting on a plane that is controlled by somebody in a ground based armchair, sucking on Slurm, and not facing any personal risk. If the driver doesn't have skin in the game, I'm not riding.

Pilots are a must for passenger aircraft. I'm not sure about cargo, but I'm leaning toward requiring pilots there too. Especially if they are to share airspace with passenger aircraft.

You are already depending on the ground controllers to keep the planes from slamming into one another. To say they have no "skin in the game" is only true if they are sociopaths. Most people would not recover from the mental anguish of killing hundreds of innocent people.

You are already depending on the ground controllers to keep the planes from slamming into one another. To say they have no "skin in the game" is only true if they are sociopaths. Most people would not recover from the mental anguish of killing hundreds of innocent people.

Pilots can refuse the instructions by the tower by announcing their inability of compliance. Ultimately the pilots have the final say on the plane, not the ground controller.

One thing I wondered after 9/11 and the addition of 'reinforced cockpit doors' is whether pilots actually need access to the cabin at all. Imagine they have a separate entrance onto the plane, and are completely sealed off from the cabin once in flight. (They get all the other basic necessities of life - food, coffee, restroom, etc. - already with them up front.) Additionally, unless officials on the ground feel they need to know, the pilots have no clue what's going on in the cabin - no CCTV feed, no intercom, no cell phones, no nothing. Terrorists could be threatening to slaughter the passengers like sheep, but the pilots aren't informed. So despite the risk to the passengers, the terrorist could never get control of the plane, making an attack on a plane pointless in the first place.

Great idea. Its called secondary barriers. And currently, ALPA is exerting great effort on the legislative front to mandate installation in commercial aircraft. IATA and Airlines for America (A4A) (is that not the stupidest name you ever heard?), are busy fighting this. Like most safety features, it costs money, which eats into profits. Gotta keep those ticket prices at historic lows...

Terrorists could be threatening to slaughter the passengers like sheep, but the pilots aren't informed.

Sorry to inform you, you are on your own back there. You will have to go postal on them yourselves. Nothing, absolutely not

This is an example of why having pilots pass through TSA security is unneeded- a constant irritation for me. A proper in-depth background check is all that is necessary, accompanied by ongoing review.

You, too, can do what pilots do. I do. It's called TS PreCheck [tsa.gov], and as a result, I show up at the airport (LAX usually), walk to an at-most 2 person line, drop my bag and cell phone on the belt, and walk through a metal detector. Security takes less than a minute, even if I have to wait for one other person in the lane. No removal of shoes, or taking off my coat, or taking my laptop out of my bag, etc. Just walk through a metal detector like back in the 90s...

Indeed, there's something even better than that for me: Known Crewmember checkpoints. However, not all airports have these. TSA PreCheck is for passengers/ticketholders. I'm speaking as a badged, background-checked, finger-printed pilot that is annoyed by the fact that I must pass through security screening to make sure my nail clippers are legal, and I'm not carrying pepper spray. Were I to wish ill to my passengers, I would not need a weapon. Some pilots enroll as an FFDO and carry weapons just to avoid t

I personally don't understand half the rules. I just recently returned from China, on American Airlines (heading back in another 10 days). Got bumped to first class. Ordered the chicken for dinner. Got the meal, a 4.5" long serrated metal knife, a solid metal butter knife, and two metal forks. Why should I worry about carrying on a knife when I can just book a first class ticket and have the airline hand them to me?

We already got a deskjob in the air travel industry, it is called air traffic control. And despite the ease of staffing it, the ease of having regular, short shifts so that staff can be available, in redundant numbers for emergencies and well rested, air traffic control is routinely understaffed and overworked.

Do you think remote pilots would be immune from the eternal pressures of cost cutting (on functional staff, never on executive wages). If one remote pilot can monitor one remote flight, why not two.

"I'm a pilot, and I've already experienced several equipment malfunctions that would have led to a crash if we hadn't done our job. That's certainly more than the number of crashes I've caused (none)."

I there's no you, nobody can get forced to fly into buildings, land in Cuba etc.No risk of food poisoning or alcohol or heart attack or...You're an interested party, we can't just believe whatever anecdotes you tell us.

If there's a reinforced door, it's likely nobody can get forced into anything.If there's food poisoning / drunk / heart attack, that's what a copilot is for.Yes, a pilot is an interested party - interested in staying alive, too.

Now let's add a remote control device, remove the pilot, and imagine that instead of a bunch of terrorists having to coordinate physically hijacking a half-dozen planes (and now also having to get through reinforced doors to reach the cabin), you've got a bunch of terrorists getting

So we have a bunch of pilots sitting in an office building somewhere controlling all the flights. The terrorists' target is no longer the cockpit on the actual plane but the building the pilots are in, or the comms link between the two. The difference is that taking over or destroying the building (which would be admittedly difficult) allows the terrorists to take over hundreds of planes.

We can reduce the risk by distributing the pilots in pairs in small offices all over the country. Even better, put the

On the surface, it's much easier to build a self-flying machine than a robotic car or even a vacuum cleaner.

The space were you can fly is more or less well known, there are a number of accurate and independent positioning systems available,the traffic is controlled so nothing should show up in front of the aircraft. The runways are equipped with ILS systems that guides the plane ona perfect glide slope. The most problematic part might actually be to taxi f

Your points mentioned above are valid except I'd argue this one is not fully considered:

AI can be integrated, or even replace the pilots without much of a change....

The abstraction of real time data given to a remote pilot is a real cost to be considered, given that many aspects of flight are dynamic and unpredictable. For example: routing through weather, mountain wave, multiple system failures, OCF (out of control flight), avoidance of traffic, sequence and separation, wake turbulence, are just a few issues that are diminished by remote piloting. And AI would need to come a long w

The US Airforce has been flying older jets via remote control for decades as part of the drone conversion programme to allow for air to air and surface to air missile testing and training - currently they are on the early F-16s after expending the F-4 inventory.

Unless these remote pilots are sitting in full simulators that force them to share the terror of passengers during an uncontrolled descent - if you know you're going to live regardless what happens to the plane and its contents - then it removes just a bit of visceral motivation to avoid it happening, doesn't it?

As an example, consider AF447 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 [wikipedia.org]. While the outcome of this mishap was largely due to mistakes by the pilots prior to penetrating the weather and afterward by misapplication of controls during stall, it is highly doubtful that a remote pilot could ever have effected a recovery, even if he was not responsible for getting into this situation in the first place. The abstraction of kenesthetic data might someday be improved enough to make a recovery like this pos

Pilots could work normal shifts and you could change your flight crew in the middle of the Pacific if they were tired or in case of a medical emergency. For some reason, the people that we depend upon the most to be alert and make important decisions, like doctors and pilots, don't seem to get enough sleep.

"...this may herald the biggest revolution in civil aviation since Wilbur Wright won the coin toss at Kitty Hawk in 1903."
What hyperbolic bullshit. Not only have standard piloted planes been remotely controlled for decades (as opposed to specially designed UAVs), but I'd say that reliable flight in instrument meteorological conditions (IMC) was a bigger revolution.
This is merely a small stepping stone to remote flight that's reliable enough for regular public transport. It's not a fucking revolution. But

Captain Obvious is annoyed that you woke him up to tell him the blindingly obvious news that pilots are going the way of the buggy whip - just like automobile drivers and ditch diggers.

Captain Obvious also has some further thoughts for you. It's not just the pilots who are going away. Why should business travelers and even the general public want to fly about from place to place when there are cell phones? Hmmm? Already you can see as well as hear anybody anywhere in the world with a reasonably recent cell phone. Do you really think they won't be adding touch, taste, and smell via direct nerve stimulation? Why do you have to waste time and limited and expensive energy to go see your mother or go on a date? This way you won't catch a cold from your mother sneezing, and you can have a date with anybody, be adventurous, you can't get herpes or worse. Travel accidents, illnesses, and threatening confrontations are so old fashioned.

In fact, why get out of bed at all? Most jobs are obsolete anyway, and I wouldn't be so sure that IT and corporate officer jobs can't be automated too. Your robotic equipment can keep you nourished in bed and stimulate your nerves to keep your muscles toned and inject medicaments to keep clots from forming.

Why go to the trouble of seeking new experiences or exploring in the flesh? Robotic explorers make ever so much more sense. You can always catch the omni-sense documentary of the exploration.

This is a cool demo and all, but I find it highly unlikely any travelers will ever set foot on a plane where the pilot isn't also on-board. Simply put; radio tech is not perfect and in the event of a systems failure of some description you need a decision-making human being to make the final decision about a resolution. There's also the point of "accepted risk", where the pilot has just as much "skin in the game" as you do as a traveler.

The worst flight I have ever been on was one where the pilot made a pre

What did all of those taxi drivers do before taxis? What did the accountants do before the income tax? My read of history is that there will be short-term pain, but ultimately people will move into jobs that take advantage of our reduced need to spend time producing necessities.

They were carriage drivers. Before income tax, there were no spreadsheets and even tabulators were dreadfully expensive so corporations had to hire a hell of a lot of accountants just to run the adding machines.

Consider, if we are at all successful at automating away work, at some point we can only realize that leisure if work hours are reduced for the same pay rather than just having fewer people working the same or longer hours. The last time there was a significant reduction in the average work day that

Consider, if we are at all successful at automating away work, at some point we can only realize that leisure if work hours are reduced for the same pay rather than just having fewer people working the same or longer hours. The last time there was a significant reduction in the average work day that didn't involve starvation ages it took the threat of a communist revolution to accomplish it.

But also because we want more money to do more things. I've thought about the idea of asking for a 80% position - four day week - because I'd do fine on 80% of my current salary but I'd have a three day weekend every weekend. In the end I don't because it seems strange to me not to have a "full" job for no other reason that I don't feel like working that much and because there's always stuff you can spend extra money on. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just being silly and I'd be happier just cutting back and "ca

One of the problems with working less than full time is that many modern jobs have a good-sized portion of fixed overhead -- just keeping up with what is going on, staying current, attending meetings and so on can take up a significant fraction of your work week. If you cut a day out of your week, the fixed overhead gets proportionally larger...

Another problem is that there are fixed overheads associated with having employees. Just finding and hiring the right ones (and getting rid of the wrongly chosen one

What did all of those taxi drivers do before taxis? What did the accountants do before the income tax? My read of history is that there will be short-term pain, but ultimately people will move into jobs that take advantage of our reduced need to spend time producing necessities.

They didn't exist, that's what they did. Before taxis, there were zero automobiles. Before income tax, accountants had more of an inventory management role, making marks on clay tablets to keep track of how much grain was in the bins. Also,in case it has escaped your notice, the population of the planet has doubled in the past 50 years. There's more competiton for jobs than there has ever been.

CNet respectfully disagrees [cnet.com]. FTFA: Each robot will cost around three times the annual salary of a human worker at Foxconn to produce. So a robot that doesn't need time off, or paying, or a holiday, or medical insurance, or a lunch break, only has to last three years to be a viable replacement for a human worker who has to feed his family and keep the roof over their heads. Result: Foxconn develops a completely obedient workforce, human workforce which is prone to sabotage, strike, medical emergency, needs a

Every time there is an advancement in technology we end up being able to produce more for less cost. This has been going on since the time of your luddites (1817) and probably earlier. If what you're saying was true, we'd be able to graph a rising unemployment rate to correlate with advancing industrialisation. This, again, hasn't happened. Instead what's happened is standards of living have improved and unemployment has fluctuated up and down due to a wide variety of factors, but generally remaining low in

Cheaper? How so? They still have to pay the pilot, whether she is siting on the ground or not.

I guess it could get cheaper if they can have one pilot supervising a dozen flights. Over mid-ocean, there's not much to do. So stagger the flight times and have them land/take off another plane elsewhere. Rotating shifts could be an advantage on long flights. At the end of eight hours, hand over the controls to a ground center where the pilots are wide awake on local time.

The fully automatic modes have to be much better than humans before people will accept them. If you ride in the front train of a Chicago CTA train, you can hear the overspeed warning beeping from the operator cabin about every 10 seconds. If the operator ignores it, the train will automatically shut down to prevent the train from derailing.

the monorail at Gatwick doesn't have a driver, it is entirely automated. You can in fact, stand at either end and look out the front or rear window (either is changeable depending on the direction of travel). The control pod is under the deck at the North end of the car.

So how far does that train fall before it hits the ground if something fails? Just turning it off isn't a catastrophic failure.

- - - - -

You take the human systems out of the plane and you aren't just dealing with the failures you observed with the previous system. You have changed the system so you are changing the possible failure points.
One simple example: "Portable EMP generator."

Believe me when I say this is already happening. These constant competitive pressures to reduce costs resulted in Colgan 3407 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407 [wikipedia.org], where inexperience and fatigue resulted in lost lives. And another example is Qantas' efforts to start an Asian subsidiary to subvert Australian pilot jobs as a cost saving measure.

I would hope the flying public considers safety rather than only seek the lowest price.

Everyone immediately leaps to talking about passenger aircraft, but this is going to see large-scale use in air freight first. Passenger craft...perhaps, maybe, one day.

This adds quite a bit to the profitability of freight--or, once the market has done its work, reduced the cost of air freight. Take out the air crew and associated life support systems, and you can add another 300-500 kilos of freight to the manifest.

FedEx, DHL, etc. are going to be all over this, if they can get the idea

Nobody has said anything yet but, one reason an Aircraft is saved from a crash is because the Pilot is actually in the Aircraft. With no Pilot, there is less incentive to save an Aircraft, or any man-made machine for that matter. The Pilot has a 100% survival rate. And you all know this.